The Milwaukee Art Museum has returned two 19th-century stoneware vessels by Dave (David) Drake to the ceramicist's descendants under an ownership transfer agreement that allows the objects to remain on long-term display. The hefty jars — dated circa 1840–50 and 1855 — are examples of Drake's ceramic mastery as well as his defiance: he inscribed them with his name and brief original poems at a time when Black literacy was criminalized in the antebellum South. "For our family, this agreement is about more than the ownership of these two vessels," said Yaba Baker, Drake's fourth great-grandson, in a press statement. "It is about recognizing David Drake as our ancestor whose voice, expertise, and creativity have endured for over 175 years." Colloquially known as Dave the Potter, Drake was born into slavery around 1801 on a plantation in the Carolinas. As a teenager he was brought to work in the pottery business of Harvey Drake and Abner Landrum in Edgefield, South Carolina — the epicenter of ceramic production in the 19th-century American South — where he became a master potter known for throwing particularly large works. He surreptitiously learned to read and write despite South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740, which imposed harsh penalties on literacy among enslaved and free African Americans, and exercised his agency by incising his name into his pottery and authoring rhyming couplets. The Wisconsin museum's transfer was followed this week by a Virginia museum's announcement of the return of another "Dave the Potter" vessel, suggesting a widening institutional reckoning with the ownership of Drake's work.